Marion Thorpe was a concert pianist whose life was defined by her two
marriages: one Royal, one to Jeremy Thorpe

Marion Thorpe, who has died aged 87, was a concert pianist and co-founder of the Leeds International Piano Competition, and destined for a brilliant career on the concert circuit; instead her life was defined by two high-profile marriages: to the Earl of Harewood, the Queen’s cousin, and to Jeremy Thorpe, leader of the Liberal Party.

Having grown up in the heady cultural hothouse of pre-war Vienna — where she met Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg referred to her as his “haselnüsschen” (“little hazelnut”) — she retained a lifelong rapport with musical masters (she would later become one of the closest female friends of Benjamin Britten, with whom she played both piano duets and tennis).

In 1961 Fanny Waterman, her son’s piano teacher, had the idea for an international piano competition based in Leeds and enlisted her support. Marion, who since 1949 had been the Countess of Harewood, was able to secure the patronage of her mother-in-law, the Princess Royal (Princess Mary), as well as opening the door to many other society contacts.

“The Leeds” was first held in 1963 and quickly established a reputation as one of the foremost classical music competitions, on a par with the International Tchaikovsky in Moscow and the International Van Cliburn in Texas. The roll-call of winners from its early days was spectacular — Radu Lupu, Murray Perahia and Dmitri Alexeev, among them — while those who took runners-up prizes was even more so: Mitsuko Uchida, András Schiff and Peter Donohoe, to name but a few.

Marion’s second marriage, to Jeremy Thorpe, the dashing leader of the Liberal Party, was overshadowed by accusations that he had conspired to murder Norman Scott, a former male model who claimed to have been Thorpe’s homosexual lover. Thorpe was acquitted at the Old Bailey in 1979, but his career was over; thereafter the couple remained largely out of the public gaze.

Related Articles

Marion and Jeremy Thorpe leaving the Old Bailey in 1979 (HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY)

She was born Maria Donata Nanetta Paulina Gustava Erwina Wilhelmine Stein in Vienna on October 18 1926, the daughter of Erwin Stein, a prominent Jewish musician and editor who had been a pupil of Schoenberg, and his wife Sophie. “My father’s circle was that of the so-called Second Viennese School,” she once said, recalling that Alban Berg — whose opera Lulu her father had arranged into a vocal score — was “enormously tall and dark and handsome”. Inter-war Vienna, she said, “considered itself the musical shrine of the world”.

As a child she was immersed in music, such as Mozart’s The Magic Flute, although her father deemed Don Giovanni, Carmen and La Bohème unsuitable. Mahler, with whom her father was acquainted, was another influence.

After the Anschluss in 1938 the family left Vienna; Erwin Stein joined Boosey & Hawkes in London, working as Britten’s publisher. When he was interned on the Isle of Man in 1940, Marion and her mother were forced to survive on a weekly allowance of only £3.

After schooling in Kensington she studied with Kendall Taylor at the Royal College of Music. Later she took lessons with Franz Osborn, while Clifford Curzon became something of a mentor .

She was 12 when she first met Britten, curtsying to him after a concert at the Queen’s Hall — something he teased her about for many years. When a fire destroyed the Steins’ apartment in 1944 the family lodged for 18 months with Britten and Peter Pears in St John’s Wood, although she later described the arrangement as “not always easy”.

She would play Schubert, Mozart and Mahler with Britten, and enjoyed a front-row seat during the preparations for his opera Peter Grimes, which opened at Sadler’s Wells in June 1945. However, playing tennis with the composer was frightening. “He was really very good… he hated losing,” she recalled of their matches at the Red House in Aldeburgh for a rare BBC interview last year to mark the centenary of the composer’s birth.

By 1948, the 21-year-old Marion was a noted beauty, and while attending Britten’s new music festival at Aldeburgh she met and fell in love with the festival’s president, the seventh Earl of Harewood, who was 11th in line to the throne. Britten counselled that “absolutely nothing should weigh in importance beside whether you really love him”. At first Queen Mary objected to their union. Lord Harewood summed up her view of his bride: “Not only Jewish … she doesn’t hunt”.

Marion Thorpe on her first wedding day in 1949 (HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY)

The couple married at St Mark’s Church, North Audley Street, in September 1949, the Royal Family interrupting their summer at Balmoral to attend the ceremony, which included the first performance of A Wedding Anthem by Britten. Five hundred policemen lined the streets of London and 900 guests attended the reception at St James’s Palace.

A few months earlier Marion had taken part in the premiere of The Little Sweep (part of Britten’s Let’s Make an Opera) at Aldeburgh. By all accounts she was a first-rate pianist, whose radiant personality was reflected in her sparkling performance. But after her children were born she retired from the concert platform. “I got so far, and let it go,” she once said. “I don’t regret it.”

Now chatelaine of the magnificent Palladian Harewood House, north of Leeds, she threw herself into organising events. In March 1950, for example, she created an opera-inspired fancy dress ball in aid of Britten’s English Opera Group, featuring Frederick Ashton and Moira Shearer dancing the tango from the ballet Façade. The following year Britten dedicated Billy Budd to the Harewoods.

Marion with her first husband George Lascelles, 7th Earl of Harewood, at the ICA in 1950

Between the first Leeds piano competition in 1963 — for which she persuaded Britten to write Notturno, a work that all the competitors were required to play — and the second in 1966, her marriage unravelled when Lord Harewood admitted adultery with Patricia Tuckwell, an Australian model. Britten ordered him to resign from Aldeburgh Festival; for many years he was not welcome at Court.

The couple were divorced in 1967. That same year Marion began to co-write, with Fanny Waterman, the Me and My Piano series of piano tutor books for beginners. A bestselling series for Faber’s musical list, they have sold more than two million copies.

In the early 1970s the pianist Moura Lympany introduced Marion to Jeremy Thorpe, the MP for North Devon, whose first wife, Caroline Allpass, had been killed in a car crash in June 1970. The couple married quietly at Paddington Register Office in 1973 and Marion now immersed herself in being a political wife.

But divorce from a member of the Royal Family was followed by further social ostracism when her husband was consumed by the scandal that ended his career. The case centred on the claim by Andrew Newton, a former airline pilot, that he had been hired by Thorpe to kill Norman Scott, but in the event had only managed to shoot Scott’s Great Dane, Rinka, before his gun jammed (the scandal became known as “Rinkagate”).

Marion Thorpe supported her husband loyally throughout, never leaving his side. She was in court each day and shared his relief when, after considerable deliberation on the part of the jury, and a night in the cells for her husband, the court acquitted him. The strain of the case seriously impaired Jeremy Thorpe’s health and it was not long after that he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. Marion nursed him for many years until prevented from doing so by her own infirmities.

Marion Thorpe with her husband Jeremy outside the Old Bailey in 1979 (TOPHAM/AP)

Although she kept a magnificent piano at their 16th-century thatched cottage in the hamlet of Higher Chuggaton, it was rarely used. The room in which it was housed was described by one visitor as “like a mausoleum”. To those who met her in later life, Marion Thorpe could seem cold and distant. But, as Barrie Penrose noted in Rinkagate, his book about the Thorpe scandal: “Friends said that this was no more than reserve... that she had had such a difficult life that she understood the pain of failure”.

After Britten’s death in 1976 she continued to serve as a trustee of the Britten Pears Foundation and in 1985 compiled a 75th birthday tribute book for Pears.

Marion Thorpe, who was appointed CBE in 2008, is survived by Jeremy Thorpe and by the three sons of her first marriage, the eldest of whom succeeded to the Earldom in 2011.

Marion Thorpe, born October 18 1926, died March 6 2014

Now listen to the Obits Podcast, The Deadline. This week: British influence abroad. We talk about colonial officers adopting elephants, financiers helping Sheikhs shape Dubai, African Elvises, and a spy school in Lebanon. Not forgetting Moustache News – our round up of all the military obits we have printed this week. Plus a rat-a-tat exchange on the Letters page with that master of the espionage thriller, John Le Carre.